25 Jul ARTICLE | On the origins of environmental bullshit

This article is part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. The series examines today’s post-truth problem in public discourse: the thriving economy of lies, bullshit and propaganda that threatens rational discourse and policy.

The project brings together scholars of media and communications, government and international relations, physics, philosophy, linguistics, and medicine, and is affiliated with the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), the Sydney Environment Institute and the Sydney Democracy Network.

I grew up in the Long Island suburbs of New York and have vivid memories of running behind the “fog trucks”. These trucks went through the neighbourhoods spraying DDT for mosquito control until it was banned in 1972.

I didn’t know it until much later, but that experience, and exposure, was extended due to the pesticide industry’s lies and tactics – what is now labelled “post-truth”.

Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. It was a beautifully written, if distressing, bit of what we today call “research translation”. The “silent spring” was the impact of DDT as songbird species were killed off.

Carson tried to expose the chemical industry’s disinformation. For doing so, she was roundly and untruthfully attacked as a communist and an opponent of progress. Silent Spring was one of the most popular and vetted overviews of environmental science of all time. Yet lies and bullshit prevented a decent policy response for a decade.

Back in the day DDT was used with nearly no restrictions. From American Experience/PBS.

And the lies won’t go away. In 2007, one of the think-tanks responsible for climate science misinformation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, began reiterating one of the main refuted claims about Carson. She was said to be responsible for millions of deaths due to the ban on DDT to control mosquitoes that spread malaria.

The reality is that while DDT was banned for agriculture in the US – and spraying on kids in suburban neighbourhoods – it was never banned for anti-malarial use. Even now. But the political right and the dirtiest chemical industry players in all of industrial capitalism have long painted environmentalists as killers – of people, progress and jobs.

It’s a carefully manufactured campaign of lies and disinformation. As a result, many people believe Carson is a flat-out mass murderer – not a hero who beautifully blended care for human health and nonhuman nature in one of the most important and challenging books of the 20th century.

Lies and smears have a long history

This anti-environmentalist tactic of countering critiques of industrial impacts on the planet with lies, obfuscation and defamation has a long history. It goes back at least to establishment attacks on the US municipal housekeeping movement in the progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th century.

This 1913 municipal housekeeping poster shows many home duties related to government, but the movement’s members were smeared as unworthy women.Internet Archive Book Images/flickr

Municipal housekeeping in particular was primarily a women’s movement to clean up cities. This eventually led to the development of formal offices of public health and public planning in local governments.

The opposition – from meatpackers to fertiliser makers to the waste industry – labelled these women bad housekeepers. They argued that the only reason women wanted to “mother” and keep house in the community was because they were so bad at such things at home – that municipal housekeeping was only a movement against domestic housekeeping.

In other words, they were not real women and were unconcerned with anyone but themselves.

Not surprisingly, the polluting industries were at the heart of such bullshit attacks. And in both this example from the early 20th century and the Carson example from the 1960s, industry used a very gendered attack as part of the post-truth campaign.

The theme of industrial lies covering environmental damage continued in the 1980s in the Pacific Northwest timber wars. Once again, environmentalists were scapegoated for the loss of timber jobs.

Efforts to protect the spotted owl were blamed for the loss of jobs due to timber industry automation.USFS/flickr, CC BY

These job losses were primarily due to automation. But the controversy over the endangered spotted owl allowed the timber industry to create another narrative – that environmentalists cared about birds more than jobs, that they wouldn’t be happy until the economy was devastated, and that all of the changes that harmed timber workers were due to environmental regulation – not the industry itself.

The attack on science ramped up then as well. When scientists declared that each pair of owls needed a certain exclusive range, and so protecting them from extinction would entail preserving whole forests, the industry-captured Forest Service simply shrank the recommendation.

The very real environmental science was dismissed. Subsequent policy was based in fantasy, wishful thinking and the lies of the industry. The timber wars were another example of science on the one hand and industry lies – supported by government – on the other.

The history of climate change denialism since the 1980s has really been the culmination of the attack on environmental science.

It has been based on the production of lies developed by the fossil fuel industry through industry-funded conservative think-tanks, laundered through conservative foundations, spun and repeated by right-wing media outlets, and adopted as ideology by the Republican Party. Its representatives are supported by even more industry and conservative funding of elections, or face opposition from others if they don’t comply.

The goal is simple and clear: no regulation on industry, and what environmental sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “institutionalisation of delay” on climate policy. The tools are simple as well: lies, obfuscation, defamation and the creation of an image of scientific uncertainty.

What is the current state of affairs after 30 years of this climate denial machine?

In the US, at least 180 congressional members and senators are declared climate deniers. They’ve received more than US$82 million in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry and its partners.

This is a long, complicated and well-trod story told, among others, by Naomi Oreskes in Merchants of Doubt, and by Michael Mann in The Madhouse Effect. It has been going on a long time.

The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favouring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over co-operation and conciliation.

So it was “big political money” – not the industry, not the Koch brothers’ campaign, not an all-out effort to shift public opinion, just “political money”. Democratic hubris becomes a central reason for Republicans believing in fake science. The argument is that this was a reaction to President Barack Obama’s regulatory approach in his second term, as if denialism didn’t exist before 2012.

And then there’s the idea that this is a bipartisan problem – of extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric – rather than one the anti-environmental right created.

Brulle took to Twitter to criticise the story – primarily the short timeframe. Clearly, climate obfuscation doesn’t start in 2008, when The New York Times story starts. The climate change denial machine has been up and running since at least 1988, 20 years longer than the story suggests.

Brulle was also livid that a story on the social aspects of climate discourse did not cite a single expert. This was despite there being hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and books on the denial machine.

So even the major media refuse to clearly expose the undermining of real environmental science, and the creation of lies and bribes to distort public policymaking. But this work is out there. It’s really the thorough work done on the climate denial machine that lays out the methodology of the development of environmental distortions, lies and post-truth discourse.

And, again, this is the core example of the evolution of environmental bullshit: a long history of industry creation of lies; conservative funding of think-tanks, front groups and the echo chamber; the development of an ideological imperative of denialism; and then the necessity of completely groundless bullshit to shore up the lies. It’s all there.

This methodology has clearly been used here in Australia. Graham Redfearn, writing for the desmog blog and The Guardian, has done amazing and thorough work on the denial machines in the US and Australia – and their links. In Australia, a clear link exists between climate denialism and the coal industry.

Many on the right, including the current and past prime ministers, parrot the lies and PR language of the industry – energy poverty, coal is cheap, clean coal is possible, 10,000 jobs, etc. It’s a tale as old as tobacco, lead, timber wars and DDT. It’s as old as industries that know their products do public harm, but lie to keep them in use.

The point here is simply to acknowledge what many have argued about the whole idea of “post-truth” – it’s not anything new, but just more of the same.

Environmentalists have long seen the propagation of lies, piles of bullshit, the dismissal of science, and the creation of mythologies as a consistent core of corporate misbehaviour – and, unfortunately, conservative ideology.

5 days agoby sydneydemocracyKellie Tranter and Professor John Keane close the discussion at War and Democracy: Who Decides? this evening on #internationaldayofpeace@sydney_uni Thanks to the Australians for War Powers Reform, Gillian Triggs, Paul Barratt and Kellie Tranter!

Event Details

On 21 November 2017, Ukraine will mark the fourth anniversary of the Euromaidan revolution. Almost four years ago people gathered in the main square of Kyiv under the flags of

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On 21 November 2017, Ukraine will mark the fourth anniversary of the Euromaidan revolution. Almost four years ago people gathered in the main square of Kyiv under the flags of the European Union for democratic values and against the kleptocratic regime of then President Viktor Yanukovych. Three months later, over a hundred activists were killed, Crimea became part of the Russian Federation and eastern Ukraine was torn apart in the war. For the fourth anniversary of Euromaidan, Olga Oleinikova will discuss the three most significant political and social gains and three corresponding deficits for the democratic development of Ukraine after the Euromaidan revolution. The seminar will conclude with a discussion around Ukraine’s vision for its democratic future.

Olga Oleinikova is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Communications. Olga also holds the position of Honorary Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and acts as a Director of Ukraine Democracy Initiative, co-hosted by the University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney. Her two main research projects are: one on diaspora and democracy in Eastern Europe and one on outmigration from Ukraine to Asia-Pacific following the collapse of Soviet Union. Both projects are mixed-method studies examining the challenges, performance and prospects for democracy in Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

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War is destructive and deadly. The First World War is often thought to have shown that war is futile. Yet the Second World War, although even more spectacularly horrible and deadly,

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War is destructive and deadly. The First World War is often thought to have shown that war is futile. Yet the Second World War, although even more spectacularly horrible and deadly, lent itself to being represented as a ­ or indeed The ­Good War, the war in which good triumphed over evil, freedom and democracy over genocidal racism and totalitarianism. This apparent success in making the world a better place through war has since provided not only a trope through which war can be justified but ­more than that ­ a moral imaginary that powerfully suggests the appropriateness or even need to wage war for the Good. This has been visible in contemporary Western war as ethical war. From Kosovo to Iraq, the West has seen itself as delivering a better world to populations suffering from oppression, genocide and other serious human rights abuses, while protecting freedom and democracy at home. We are trapped in a dilemma, however, if what we do risks killing those we ostensibly seek to protect. This paper argues that this long-standing and powerful dilemma requires us to move beyond existing ways of conceiving the ethics of war to understand war as a politics of ethics.

Speaker:

Maja Zehfuss, Professor of International Politics at University of Manchester, UK

Chair:

James Der Derian, Professor and Michael Hintze Chair of International Security; and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies.

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What does a renewable energy future look like?
In partnership with Sydney Ideas.
Global energy markets are in process of rapid change and transformation. Over the last decade, renewable energy technologies

Event Details

Global energy markets are in process of rapid change and transformation. Over the last decade, renewable energy technologies like solar and wind have become dramatically cheaper and now challenge the economics of traditional fossil-fuel energy systems. Added to this, the catastrophic implications of human-induced climate disruption are forcing governments to seriously embrace decarbonisation as demonstrated in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. However, the US Government’s recent rejection of clean energy legislation and proposed expansion of coal, oil and gas highlight how the old fossil fuel order is not giving up without a fight and there are countervailing trends evident in current political battles over energy and climate. This Sydney Ideas event will bring together three expert speakers on the potential for renewable reinvention and a global green shift. What are the opportunities and challenges Australia and the world face in the coming decade as we try to kick our fossil fuel habit and embrace a cleaner, more sustainable energy future?

Chair: Professor Christopher Wright

Panel:Professor John Mathews is a leading scholar of the greening of capitalism and the role that China and East Asian countries play in this process. In September 2014 he and his collaborator Dr Hao Tan had an article published in Nature, on the theme of renewables, energy security and China. This interest in greening of business stems from a decade and more of scholarship focused on the competitive dynamics of international business, the evolution of technologies and their strategic management, and the rise of new high technology industries, especially their creation in East Asia through strategies of technology leverage and the management of technology diffusion. His work now focuses on the emergence of the ‘green economy’ and the transition to renewable energies, and the institutional changes needed to provide industrial capitalism with genuine long-term sustainability.

Emma Herd is Chief Executive Officer at the Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC). Prior to IGCC, Emma spent 15 years at Westpac Banking Corporation where she had a range of roles across carbon finance and emissions trading, ESG Risk assessment, public policy and sustainability strategy development. Emma has participated in a number of key public forums, government and industry bodies relating to climate change and the environment. Emma is a Non-Executive Director of the Carbon Market Institute and a member of the Cornerstone Capital Global Advisory Council. She holds a Bachelor of Asian Studies (Thai) Hons.

Professor Tony Vassallo holds the Delta Electricity Chair in Sustainable Energy Development in the Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology. Although a physical chemist by training he can masquerade as an engineer when required. He is a passionate advocate of the need to transition to low carbon energy sources, and in particular, the development of battery energy storage to facilitate very high levels of renewable generation. He teaches sustainability and researches energy storage.
A past President of the Australian Institute of Energy, he is also Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Development in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.

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Dissidents. Rebels. Resisters. Protesters have the moral gumption to stand up for what is good and right… right?
Our world and its people are full of competing needs, desires and ideologies.

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Dissidents. Rebels. Resisters. Protesters have the moral gumption to stand up for what is good and right… right?

Our world and its people are full of competing needs, desires and ideologies. As the saying goes, one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.

From Pauline Hanson’s burqa stunt to same-sex marriage postal survey boycotts and movements as large as Black Lives Matter, protests can be highly visceral. As images of burning torches in recent weeks have shown us, protesters can exploit visual symbolism for great emotive impact – whether good or bad.

So when is protest the most ethical action to take?

Some question the effectiveness of protest as a tool for change. How much has Occupy Wall Street influenced the banking and finance sector, for example? Are “no platforming” protests really creating a more tolerant society?

Given large street protests, even peaceful ones, carry a risk of disintegrating into chaos, what are the conditions for organising one?

Perhaps there are more effective ways to make change happen and protest should be reserved for a last step when negotiations fail. Perhaps some issues just demand we come together to express raw and unedited dissatisfaction en masse. Or does the risk of violence require us to hold back from standing up for our values and principles publicly?

Join us as we rally together to explore the Ethics of Protest with crowd favourite, Michael Salter.

SPEAKERS

Michael Salter is a criminologist focused on the intersections of violence, culture and gender. He teaches in these areas at Western Sydney University and explores online protest in his book, Crime, Justice and Social Media.